PR you can’t afford to miss!

“If I was down to the last dollar of my marketing budget I’d spend it on PR!” – Bill Gates

Intro

Public relations (PR) are instrumental in a company’s success. Your external communications have the power to both position you within the industry and attract potential clients, customers and investors, and through effective messaging you can ensure you’re at the forefront of your target audience’s mind when they think of your service.

Deciding to embark on your PR journey is an important step in building your brand’s image, and visibility and in taking this step you are met with a wealth of potential avenues which can be confusing to begin with. However through effective budgeting and time management you can grab the bull by the horns and tackle the core ways you can communicate through your brand.

In this blog we’ll introduce you to some of the key ways you can communicate with both the press and your customers, effectively explaining your business, it’s offerings and important updates.

Pitch to the press

A press release is the most common practice to share your company news and to update the industry. By announcing your important news through a press release you have the ability to position your company as an industry leader with powerful updates. And by having your PR team reaching out to, and building a rapport with, industry journalists you can build relationships which can potentially offer further opportunities to work with them in the future.

Press releases cover a variety of announcement topics including new clients or partners, a round of successful funding, a new product or a new addition to the leadership team but there is no strict standard for what you can or can’t announce. Just make sure it’s relevant, it will resonate with readers and it matters to the industry.

Thought Leadership

Thought leadership or opinion pieces are an excellent way to establish yourself within your target market. They are released to the media and are published by journalists much like a press release. These tackle a specific problem or topic within the space and are a chance for you to display the breadth and depth of your knowledge whilst educating your customers.

Requiring more time to plan, these can be effective ways to present yourself as an expert within the area that can be trusted. This can help attract a potentially less informed audience, who are eager to learn and by choosing a topic which is prevalent at the time of writing will help drive traffic to your website as people will be searching for information.

Blogs

Beyond just distributing content to the media, it is important not to neglect your own organic content mediums. A blog is a great way to share smaller updates and information without being constricted to traditional media formatting allowing you to be more personable with your language as though you’re directly talking to a customer.

Blogs are short and sweet, typically only covering around 500 words, and have little by way of standardisation, therefore they allow for creative freedom and imagery to support your points. They’re perfect for smaller businesses to find new customers through search engine optimisation (SEO) helping to lay the foundations for future thought leadership pieces offering snippets of important information from your industry.

Social Media

We’ve covered this before, but with over 4 billion people now active on social media it’s a vital part of your communications. Demonstrating the personality of your brand, building a large following and sharing of content both organic and from others allows you to add a new dimension to your external business.

Social media works best when you’re personable and natural. You don’t need to force content or products to your followers, and a combination of updates and interactions with potential customers helps make your business more than a product. Similarly with the use of hashtags you can reach an audience who may have never heard of your brand, but are interested in the space.

Conclusion

External communications and good PR are vital, particularly in today’s technology driven world. Customers will always go with a brand they’ve heard of, and a brand they can trust and by having an online presence, across a variety of vertices you will add another layer of credibility and legitimacy to yourself and your business.

Beyond the initial search you can build rapport with your customers through education and personality. This combined with consistent messaging throughout, will give your business the best chance of becoming established, attracting and converting consumers.